Phil and Macy

Phil and Macy

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Timothy Keller – more excerpts, one more post after this one


One of the things that made the Bible standout as truth was how it presented its heroes. I read it for a long time thinking all of these stories seem to allow things that I knew there were wrong. Then I realized the Bible was recording the good and the bad that these heroes experienced. Its honesty was something I had never found in religion. This particular passage is talking about the early church age. The apostle Peter specifically.

Hi - I'm reading "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism" by Timothy Keller and wanted to share this quote with you.

The only plausible reason that all of these incidents would be included in these accounts is that they actually happened. Also, why constantly depict the apostles—the eventual leaders of the early Church—as petty and jealous, almost impossibly slow-witted, and i the end as cowards who either actively or passively failed their master? Richard Bauckham makes similar arguments about the depiction of Peter’s denial of Jesus, even to the point of his calling down a curse on his master (Mark 14: 71). Why would anyone in the early church want to play up the terrible failures of their most prominent leader? No one would have made such a story up, and even though it is true, Bauckham reasons that no one but Peter himself would have dared to recount it unless Peter himself was the source and had authorized its preservation and propagation.

Also:

"Why would the leaders of the early Christian movement have made up the story of the crucifixion if it didn’t happen? Any listener of the gospel in either Greek or Jewish culture would have automatically suspected that anyone who had been crucified was a criminal, whatever the speaker said to the contrary. Why would any Christian make up the account of Jesus asking God in the garden of Gethsemane if he could get out of his mission? Or why ever make up the part on the cross when Jesus cries out that God had abandoned him? These things would have only offended or deeply confused first-century prospective converts. They would have concluded that Jesus was weak and failing his God. Why invent women as the first witnesses of the resurrection in a society where women were assigned such low status that their testimony was not admissible evidence in court? 13 It would have made far more sense (if you were inventing the tale) to have male pillars of the community present as witnesses when Jesus came"

I am also reading in the Old Testament book of Judges. The following verses stood out to me because Gideon was so afraid he was hiding at night but God calls him a mighty man of valor.

“And there came an angel of the Lord, and sat under an oak which was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash the Abi–ezrite: and his son Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him, and said unto him, The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour.” Judges 6:11-12 KJV
The Bible tells me "man looks on the outward appearance but God looks on the heart". There are so many examples of this it would be impossible to list them all.

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